Why doesn't autocorrect work better?

Out of the box, autocorrect in PadKeys is set up to make suggestions and fix typos based on word frequencies in your language. It also uses the positions of the keys to guess what you were trying to type. For example, in English, if you type 'cyt', it will suggest "cut", because the 'u' is next to the 'y' on the keyboard. If you type 'cpt', it will suggest "cot" instead, because it is unlikely that your finger slipped all the way from 'u' to 'p', but likely that it went from 'o' to 'p'.

When you type something like 'cit', then it gets a bit more complicated. "Cut" and "cot" are both possibilities, but it's also possible you are starting to type a longer word like "city", or that you accidentally hit 'c' after space after the previous word and you really wanted to type "it". So it suggests all of these words, ordered by the frequency with which they occur in English text.

Of course, different people have different hands and tend to make different mistakes when typing. They also tend to use different words, depending on what sort of text they type most often. For this reason, PadKeys has a learning function that will notice how often you type different words. Over the course of time it will learn not to make the suggestions that you either don't use, or backspace over after they get substituted, or tap the 'X' for when suggested in blue, and it will make more suggestions of the words you actually type.

For this reason, it is best to give PadKeys a chance to learn (anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks depending on usage) before deciding whether its autocorrect works well for you. Note also that, unlike some keyboards, we take our users' privacy seriously and do not send your data to our server to help determine other users' word suggestions. This means that PadKeys will seem worse than other keyboards when you first install it until it has a chance to learn, but we feel the greater degree of privacy is worth it.

If you still find that even after a long time PadKeys makes poor suggestions or is overly aggressive, you can enter Settings and turn the autocorrect level down to "Conservative" (less automatic replacement), "Suggestions Only" (no automatic replacement), or "Off". If you find yourself doing this, we would greatly appreciate it if you would open a support ticket with us and give us some concrete examples where it performs badly. We are always trying to improve it and having the specific examples really helps.